The best use of AI for building WordPress websites

Using AI to build WordPress websites can streamline the design and development process, making it more efficient. I’ll cover some areas where AI can help create professionally designed, longer-lasting websites.

Use AI for new WordPress websites

AI can help you the most when you have nothing. This will turn a bit meta, but I asked ChatGPT about the best use of AI for building WordPress websites, and while I don’t agree with all the answers, it gave me an outline to work with.

The same can happen when you create a website using AI. Right now, AI-building solutions integrated with WordPress via themes and plugins ask you a couple of questions and provide you with the most common pages and patterns your website will probably need.

These tools will ask you for the name of your site and your business or project category. Then, they will ask you to describe your business. This regular prompt internally generates the pages with appropriate patterns, installs the recommended plugins, and “magically” publishes your website.

Avoid AI theme and plugin dependencies

When you ask AI for something, do you care about what AI engine you are using? Unless it is trained for a particular topic or documentation, probably not. You care about the content, not about who “generates” it.

So, if you want a WordPress website, it should be built with Core blocks to last longer and be more compatible. Unless you need something much more specific at a fair amount that the AI builder will provide, your website should not be tied to a plugin or theme forever.

You can copy the generated text from an AI prompt. In the same way, you should be able to take your site anywhere, change the theme, and extend it.

Improve your website’s accessibility with AI

If an automated tool can understand your website and translate it without too many errors, humans will probably be able to do the same.

You can use AI to speed up some processes that improve accessibility. For example, it is possible to use AI to generate descriptive alt text for images, ensuring users who rely on screen readers get accurate descriptions of your visual content. But please make sure those descriptions make sense.

Video content in social networks like TikTok makes adding captions to your content accessible. But I can’t stress enough that these are just a base you should edit to improve.

I love that accessibility improvements help not only your users but also search engines understand and rank your content better.

Use AI for existing WordPress websites

If your website has already been created, all its design patterns are in place, and there is not much code to do, it’s time for content improvements.

Your first posts were probably written 100% without AI assistance. Why don’t you try to complement them using AI? You will likely find details that you didn’t consider. Remember, each time you ask AI more deeply, it can give you interesting ideas.

Have you seen how Netflix and other video platforms update the covers of their movies and series and sometimes rearrange the same content to make it more attractive? You can accomplish this quick refresh with AI tools, generating new meta descriptions and social titles for your existing pages and posts with plugins like Yoast and AI-featured images with plugins like Jetpack.

AI will help you create your website and offer services to your customers. Remember chatbots? They’re back and more powerful than ever!
AI chatbots can support your visitors by handling frequently asked questions, troubleshooting issues, and guiding them through processes like product selection. For more complex problems, they can create support tickets or even transfer to a human representative when needed. They can connect to a CRM, make appointments, and communicate in several languages.

Have you used AI to create websites? AI works excellently with WordPress templates and blocks in general, and we are getting close to using it not only to create a basic first version of websites but also at later stages, like maintenance and optimization.

Jos Velasco.

P.S. This post-featured image was created with AI, so we won’t know who deserves the credit.